NRA: A whoopee cushion on Hitler’s chair

The main outlines of 20th-century “Bible prophecy” mythology were well-established before Tim LaHaye came along. That mythology is flexible enough to allow each successive storytelling entrepreneur a chance to put their own unique spin on it, but ultimately they need to stick with the established storyline.

LaHaye’s particular contribution was to cram as many Cold-War-era John Birch Society conspiracies as he could into the existing outline. Thus we get LaHaye’s version of the Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia, who looks like “a young Robert Redford” and embodies the liberal youth culture that LaHaye has been railing against ever since Robert Redford looked like a young Robert Redford. When we first meet Nicolae, he’s all about peace, unity, harmony and all that Aquarian hippie stuff that’s always infuriated LaHaye.

Tribulation Force scientists have developed a new secret weapon in their battle against the villainy of the Antichrist.

But eventually, the prophecy mythology requires that even this supposed pacifist must “rise” to become the Antichrist the plot demands. The hippie-peacenik will have to be transformed into a mass-murdering tyrant and the cruelest, deadliest dictator the world has ever seen. This is a story about the end of the world and the culmination of history. So if the Antichrist is to be the ultimate evil chronologically, he also needs to be the ultimate evil in terms of degree. Otherwise history would seem kind of anticlimactic.

Plus there’s that title — Anti-Christ. Although LaHaye and most other “Bible prophecy scholars” don’t seem very interested in pursuing the idea, that name suggests that the Antichrist is to be a kind of evil mirror-opposite of Christ. So in a sense, if the Antichrist is anything less than the ultimate evil, it would suggest that Christ was something less than the ultimate good. To diminish the Antichrist’s evilness would seem to diminish Christ’s goodness, and they can’t have that.

But this superlative evil creates a challenge for Bible prophecy storytellers. It Godwins the thread. If the Antichrist is to be the greatest monster ever in the history of the world, then he’ll need to be obviously worse than any of the actual usual candidates for that title. It won’t work to have your Antichrist wind up seeming almost as bad as Mao, or nearly as bad as Stalin, or merely “kind of Hitler-y.” He needs to be clearly, emphatically worse than any other possible candidate.

Here in the third book is where LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins finally get around to Nicolae’s first steps toward joining that pantheon of monsters. After spending the first year and a half of the Great Tribulation seeming like not that bad a guy, Nicolae Carpathia has suddenly started nuking population centers and arbitrarily slaughtering millions of people. After claiming only a handful of murders in the first two books, our Antichrist is now starting to accumulate the kind of body count that makes his claim to be the ultimate evil a bit more credible. The authors are starting to build their case that Nicolae is worse than any of the deadly tyrants of history.

This presents two serious challenges for the authors — challenges they hardly seem aware of, let alone capable of facing.

The first problem is that all those actual tyrants whose crimes Nicolae will need to out-do were real people who really killed other real people. It’s a tricky thing to write a novel with an antagonist who appears worse than Hitler, Stalin or Mao without seeming to diminish the gravity and horror of what those actual figures did. It might be possible for a good writer to pull that off, acknowledging and honoring the full horror of the real history while at the same time exceeding it in a fictional setting, but L&J aren’t up to the task.

In their view, such a task is unnecessary, since they don’t regard their story as fiction. Theirs is an account of Bible prophecy — so it’s not a made-up story, just a true story that hasn’t happened yet. Since they believe their fictional story is a future matter of fact, it comes across as matter-of-fact — as glib where it ought to be grave.

They compound this problem. First they insist that Nicolae’s misdeeds are worse than the crimes of any real tyrant from history — which diminishes both those crimes and their real-world victims. And then they further diminish them by insisting that even Nicolae’s atrocities aren’t all that bad, since all the civilians he’s slaughtering are sinners who deserved their fate.

The second problem with making Nicolae out to be Worse Than Hitler is that both Buck Williams and Rayford Steele are working for Nicolae. If Nicolae is more evil than Hitler, then how is serving as Nicolae’s personal pilot not worse than serving as Hitler’s chauffeur?

Jerry Jenkins seems to realize he’s painted himself into a corner. He sent his heroes off to work as close confidants of the Antichrist mainly as a narrative convenience, justifying their service to Nicolae as a kind of infiltration by the resistance. But if they are double-agents working for the resistance, then at some point Buck and Rayford will need to resist, and the fatalistic logic of prophecy means that resistance is futile — or maybe even forbidden.

The heroes’ complacency toward and their co-operation with the arch-villain has been a problem for Jenkins ever since Buck and Rayford accepted their new jobs, but that problem has gotten far more acute now that Nicolae has begun acting like the Antichrist and perpetrating deadly evil on a massive scale. Increasingly, our heroes just seem to be complicit in monstrous evil.

Jenkins acknowledged this problem for Buck in the passage we looked at last week, where Buck reassured himself, and readers, that he had tried really hard to use his position as publisher of Global Weekly for good, but:

As much as he tried … everything seemed to come out with the spin of the master deceiver. … Buck just hated the idea that he himself was being used to spread propaganda and lies.

Acknowledging the problem isn’t the same thing as fixing the problem, though. As much as Buck may dislike that he is “being used” to support Nicolae’s slaughter of millions of people, neither Buck nor the authors seems to consider withdrawing that support.

That sets us up for this next scene with Rayford Steele. He goes beyond Buck’s tepid reluctance to take bold action against the Antichrist.

Or, rather, to take what the authors think of as bold action against the Antichrist. Jenkins seems to think this addresses the problem of his heroes’ complicity. I think it makes it worse, but I’ll let you decide.

Having learned that Amanda has safely departed from San Francisco, Rayford is ready to take off, allowing Nicole to destroy the city as soon as they leave. As he taxies Nicole’s plane down the runway, a flight attendant ducks into the cockpit:

“Captain,” she said as he lifted the headphone from his right ear, “not everyone is seated and buckled in.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, ‘federal anything’ means nothing anymore. Everything is global. And Carpathia is above global. If he doesn’t want to sit down, he can stand. I’ve made my announcement, and you have given your instructions, right?”

“Right.”

“Then you go get strapped in and let the potentate worry about himself.”

Rayford’s remark there that “Everything is global” is the most explicit statement so far that Nicolae’s one-world government really has superseded every other authority. That doesn’t explain why there still seem to be armed Chicago police officers, like the one who pulled a gun on Buck just 10 pages ago. But even if Jenkins is wildly inconsistent in portraying the monolithic global structure of the OWG, it’s helpful here to realize that this is what the context is supposed to be in our story.

Rayford could have begun gradually and slowly picked up enough speed to go airborne. But everybody enjoyed a powerful takeoff once in a while, right? He throttled up and took off down the runway with such speed and power that he and [copilot] McCullum were driven back into their seats.

“Yeehah!” McCullum cried. “Ride ’em cowboy!”

Rayford … couldn’t resist pressing that intercom button again and hearing what he might have done to Carpathia. In his mind’s eye he pictured the man somersaulting all the way to the back of the plane, and he only wished there was a back door he could open from the cockpit.

“Oh, my goodness!” he heard over the intercom. “Potentate, are you all right?”

Rayford heard movement, as if others were trying to unstrap themselves to help Carpathia, but with the plane still hurtling down the runway, those people would be pinned in their seats by centrifugal force.

“I am all right,” Carpathia insisted. “It is my own fault. I will be fine.”

If you’re writing a scene in which your hero is engaged in some woefully inadequate act of petty rebellion, it’s best not to undermine even that meager deed by having him daydream an exaggerated effect beforehand.

Nicolae, apparently, did not somersault all the way down the aisle.

He fell down.

And then he got back up. He’s fine.

That is the end result of the first and thus far only act of resistance undertaken by any member of the Tribulation Force.

In just the past several hours of this story, Nicolae Carpathia has killed millions of people in London, New York, Washington, Chicago and Dallas. Immediately following this scene, he will kill millions more in San Francisco and Oakland.

Rayford Steele has done nothing to interfere with this slaughter. He will do nothing to warn any of the people who just assisted him at the San Francisco airport. Rayford is a first-hand witness, a bystander, as Nicolae sends forth a wave of death meant to signify that he is worse than Hitler, Stalin or Mao.

And Rayford’s response — his only response — is to accelerate sharply, causing Nicolae to fall over in the aisle of the airplane.

Secretly, he hoped Carpathia had been leaning against one of the seats at the time of the initial thrust. That would have spun him around and nearly flipped him over. Probably my last chance to inflict any justice.

“Justice.”

The greatest monster in the history of the world, the epitome of evil, and this is Rayford’s idea of “justice.” He flies Nicolae to safety so that millions can be killed in Chicago, assists in the global broadcast of the Antichrist’s propaganda, then ferries him away from San Francisco so that everyone in that city, too, can be killed.

But he made Nicolae fall down, without injury. And that’s “justice.”

The more I read about Rayford Steele, the more I think that Nicolae Carpathia will, at most, only seem like the second-most loathesome monster in the history of the world.

You could make a case that making a dictator look foolish on a large scale could be a reasonably effective act of resistance- Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, say- and if you actually managed to make the anti-Christ stumble around like Chevy Chase doing Gerald Ford in the middle of a speech, you might rally people to lose their fear of him.

Rayford, of course, does it in private, where nobody but the innermost circle will see it. And Nicky seems to have maintained his dignify fairly well regardless, as L&J haven’t made him the kind of self serious tyrant cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous that Mussolini so abundantly was. So, the whole thing is just petty and childish. But still, if everything else had been different, it _could_ have been some kind of a thing.

hidden_urchin

Yeah, Ray, you know you had a chance to delay the bombing of SF right there? You did notice that, right?

If Rayford had been von Stauffenberg dude would have blown himself up in the bathroom dithering over bumping off the Fuehrer or getting to keep his cushy job in the Reich proper instead of having to be, you know, in Egypt or Russia.

Jeff Weskamp

Is this, like, a joke?

It isn’t? Seriously? A lame *prank* that would embarrass even a rebellious 13-year-old is considered *justice*!?!?!?

That reminds me- do L&J ever clarify what would happen if Rayford were to, say, put the plane into a 900 mph nosedive over the open ocean? Like, would Nicky be bodily resurrected in the same place, and thus have to swim his way out? Would he just shop up again elsewhere? Would God or Satan or whoever step in to stop it happening?

Wait till they decide it was such a huge success they do it again to Buttmonkey, er, Supreme Commander Leon.

Eamon Knight

Thank you. Trivial it may be next to all the other awfulness, but it was *really* bothering me, too.

Becca Stareyes

A lot of the petty rebellion seems to be the actions of a sulky teenager.

Now, when I was a teenager, I knew what actions would show my parents I was displeased but bring down no real punishment, and what would be actually rebelling against the rules and lead to punishment. Now, under the thumb of a guy that nukes cities, the sort of disobedience of minor pranks and inefficiency might seem like a good idea because it doesn’t get you shot. But:

1. Buck and Rayford are supposed to be part of a resistance, which means that they should be doing more than the joe/jane on the street who doesn’t like the dictator but doesn’t like the idea of holes in vital organs more. Basically, surviving the Antichrist doesn’t seem to be the story LeHay and Jenkins want to tell — they seem to want a thriller about the Glorious Christian Resistance. Which means one needs to resist gloriously, and not in a petty way.

2. As Real True Christians, Buck and Rayford have the benefit of knowing that however painful their deaths might be, afterward they get paradise. Granted, there’s still a lot of instincts pulling them to not be stupid about their mortalities*, and they have to consider both their loved ones and the state of the resistance since it seems mostly to be them and their wives, and various disposable minions treated like mushrooms (kept in the dark and fed shit) until they’re needed. But it at least means that creature comforts like Land Rovers and credit cards and status symbols shouldn’t mean much when they have a ticket to the swankiest afterlife in the universe with their names on it.

So, really it feels like the sulky teenager — enough to show that they are unhappy with the AntiChrist, but not enough to put them in any actual danger of even losing their jobs, let alone death and other unpleasantness.

* I’ve had plenty of examples of physics demos where my physics brain knows things are fine, but my instincts are like ‘… don’t be dumb’. I did do the bed of nails demo, though.

aunursa

The more I read about Rayford Steele, the more I think that Nicolae Carpathia will, at most, only seem like the second-most loathesome monster in the history of the world.?

Second most? I suppose it could be the case that Rayford and Buck are together, tightly embracing each other in first place?

True. Though it’s jarring to note that when we talk about “centrifugal force”, we’re really just referring to inertia, and inertia is precisely what pins people against their seats in an accelerating vehicle.

Michael Pullmann

I was thinking of “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said The Tick-Tock Man”. But Harlequin’s acts of rebellion are public and grand in scope. (I don’t know *how* he tied up the whole city’s traffic at rush hour with jelly beans, but you have to figure that made the evening newst.) He was also less concerned with bringing down his totalitarian system than inspiring others to rebellion, and possibly throwing the pebble that would one day become an avalanche.

In contrast, Rayford seems content with a momentary act of minor dickishness that maybe a dozen people, total, will ever know about. This guy is the worst resistance fighter ever.

I just realized. This is the first of many sophomoric pranks that Rayford and Mac McCullum commit in the name of “rebellion” against the Antichrist. The next most memorable one for its sheer asininity is Rayford pretending to be different voices trolling Carpathia when he’s supposed to be on an infiltrate-and-extract mission to retrieve Chang Wong.

Xclamation

I don’t know what’s worse, that in Rayford’s world millions of innocent dead can be avenged by giving the man responsible a clumsy, or that the entire scene sounds *exactly* like it came from an unfilmed David Spade/Chris Farley script.

Think about it, David Spade is the uptight airline pilot busy climbing up the corporate ladder. Chris Farley is the funny male air-line steward who just loves to rock. Carpathia is the evil head of the airline who wants to lay-off the staff to earn a giant bonus so that he can afford to build a swimming pool on the roof of his mansion. Spade and Farley team up to teach that no good Carpathia a lesson and it all starts with a scene where Spade takes off in the new 797 JumboSuperHellYeah Airdoubledecker just as Carpathia is making his speech to the directors of the board. Cue the guitar solo and the audience can sit back, secure in the knowledge that the yucks are gonna keep coming for the next 12 minutes. And then Farley will totally get the girl, Spade’s wife won’t leave him and after the credit’s we’ll all learn that Carpathia ends up selling used toilets in Canada.

What’s the over/under on me having spent more time thinking that through than Jenkins ever did?

aunursa

So if the Antichrist is to be the ultimate evil chronologically, he also needs to be the ultimate evil in terms of degree.

From the series we learn that…

Buck is the greatest investigative reporter of all time.
Rayford is the greatest airline pilot of all time.
Hattie is the greatest flight attendant of all time.
Chloe is the greatest college dropout of all time.
Chaim is the greatest scientist of all time.
Tsion is the greatest biblical scholar of all time.
David is greatest computer whiz of all time.
Chang is the greatest teenage progeny of all time.

Yet the readers were never given any evidence that these candidates were better than any actual people? Why are you complaining about ol’ Nick? Isn’t it enough for Jenkins to tell us that he is the most evil person who ever lived?

lowtechcyclist

For me, the Left Behind books bring back the distant memory of reading Bret Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero.” The protagonist of that book, like our Trib Force crew, witnesses all sorts of atrocities, but doesn’t ever reach the point of being interested in stopping any of them. “I wanted to see how bad it could get,” he keeps on thinking to himself, over and over. (Can’t vouch that that’s the exact words; it’s been a quarter-century since I read the stupid book.) I really can’t tell the moral difference between Ellis’ protagonist and Rayford, Buck & Co.

Another triviality, but… You’re a flight attendant (or possibly one of the princes, we don’t know) on a plane with the dictator of the world, who just slaughtered millions of people and could order you shot at any moment, you see him fall down under acceleration, possibly injuring himself severely, and you say “Oh my goodness”!?!?! Are you six?

It’s not like the character is an RTC who can’t swear, so what up, LaJenkins? A series of asterisks would be more realistic without putting cuss words in print.

Second most evil? You don’t think Buck can get in the running? Awww…..

(Readers here seem to divide into ones who hate Buck more than Rayford and ones who hate Rayford more than Buck. I am in the hate-Buck camp myself. But Rayford has an unfair advantage in this scene, as he has the Antichrist on a plane. Buck has to settle for being his chief of propaganda.)

aunursa

Another big moment in the Tribulation Force’s rebellion against the Global Community is in Book #8, when David Hayseed vomits all over Nicky.

David: I can’t believe I threw up in front of the anti-Christ.
<Buck: Face it, David. You threw up on the anti-Christ.

Tofu_Killer

“The Banality of Evil” indeed.

If the Left Behind universe to hold a Banality Bake Off event, Nicky wouldn’t even place in the medals.

So this What-Would-Anti-Jesus-Do thread that keeps coming up because Nicky Rockytop is simply blah, how can that best be answered?
My instincts tell me that the old measure of mass murder won’t be the best yardstick, and this passage proves it. Look at what LaJay have done here, aside from crimes against intelligence and the written word, they have slaughtered something like a 1/4 of the world’s remaining population and it doesn’t change what we think of Nicky in the least. And don’t the good guys have to slaughter sometimes? Look at Lincoln, or Eisenhower.

For anyone working on their own anti-WWJD novel, can I suggest that real evil is convincing people to willingly, enthusiastically participate in their own harm? Killing and making with the evil laugh is so Bond Villain. Now being a Fox News Anchor… that has possibilities.

Actually, Jesus didn’t…like, actually physically save that many people, did he? Sure, some, but he didn’t like– fly around like Superman stopping trains from going off the tracks or…well, whatever the opposite of the Holocaust is.

Right? But he theoretically saved souls, & theoretically laid down a larger philosophy that in sum total would help people…right?

So the Antichrist is like that. Some influential thinker whose teachings would lead others to mistreat each other, behave in inherently un-Christlike ways & would ultimately lead a ton of souls into damnation.

Persia

I think Ellis was deliberately making his protagonist hard to like, though. (Although with Ellis’ recent tweets, who the hell knows.)

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking.” Rayford put as much concern as he could manage into his voice. He was sitting on a target- his giant plane squarely in the fallout zone of the bombs that would hit San Fransisco as soon as the Potentate was safely in the air – so there was plenty of concern to go around. The tower confirmed Chloe’s plane was gone.

“I’m afraid our takeoff is going to be a little delayed.” He thumbed the intercom off just in time to protect his ears from the single, barked syllable “What!” from the passenger compartment. Someone in there started shouting, then banging on the cockpit door. As it was wedged closed with the empty and relocated copilot’s chair, Rayford was reasonably confident that it wouldn’t do any good, and ignored the noise.

Instead, he was monitoring his engines – a gauge was flashing amber on his dash, and an anonymous technician in coveralls, walking away, held up one fist with a thumb extended.

The technician would be fired, if anyone could find her; Rayford hadn’t
asked where she was going, just told her it was best to leave as soon as
possible. She’d arched an eyebrow at him, snorted “no shit, Sherlock,”
and taken her payment: a working, untraced cell phone, a card good for
at least one withdrawal from a high-level checking account, and the keys
to a brand new Range Rover.

“Good news,” he said to himself. It was all he could do; to pray aloud, here, now, would be a dead giveaway, so he didn’t spare himself even that comfort. He toggled the intercom again. “That’s resolved it, ladies and gents, here we go.”

As he taxied the sabotaged plane onto the runway, the gauge went from amber to red. Everyone enjoys a powerful takeoff sometimes, right? The initial thrust stopped the banging on the door as the person responsible yelled and went over backward.

The plane tilted horribly at a bare fifty feet in altitude, trailing fire from both engines on the left wing, and smashed back into the earth it had so recently left. Rayford’s last view was of the sky; his last thought, that they wouldn’t dare drop the bomb while the Potentate’s condition remained unknown.

No. Jenkins would never write edited profanity. He would say something like: “She said a word that Rayford himself had occasionally used before he became an RTC.” See for example from Book #2…

[President Fitzhugh] used profanity liberally, and though Buck had never been in his presence when Fitz was angry, his outbursts were legendary among staffers.
…
He swore. And then he swore again. Soon he was lacing every sentence with profanity.

The picture in my head right now is of Daria Morgendorfer, arms crossed, face neutral: “My hero.”

redsixwing

*cough* Obvs. I should’ve edited the swear out of the above, then.

aunursa

Chang Wong???? Please tell me you are joshing!

It’s absolutely true. His sister is Ming Toy. Their parents are Mr. and Mrs. Wong. Late in the series Ming marries Ree Woo. Which makes her full name Ming Chang Toy Woo.

flat

I am against any kind of torture, I think somebody who tortures somebody else in any way is disgusting and immoral.

But I REALLY REALLY want to torture rayford and Buck.
I want them to lie crying on the floor on their own completely broken and completely humiliated, no yelling out in pain but completely blank and in shock of what just happened to them.

I know it is wrong to think like this, but the urge is so incredible strong.

Mmm, redsixwing. That was exactly my thought; snap the nosewheel on the grass at the start of the take-off run, and see if they will continue the attack the with plane stuck there…or if the universe itself will change the rules and levitate the plane away just to keep the prophesy intact.

Magic_Cracker

I can’t wait for the chapter when Buck “sticks it to the man” by swiping a little bit of napalm from Infant-Kitty-Puppy Industrial Burninator to give Nicolae a hotfoot.

Magic_Cracker

The more I read about Rayford Steele, the more I think that Nicolae Carpathia will, at most, only seem like the second-most loathesome monster in the history of the world.

Agreed. Say what you want about mass-murderous Satanic despotism, at least it’s an ethos.

Nope. And for even better lack of verisimilitude, he gets trained by the douchebaggiest IT admin ever, David Hayseed Hassid, who uses Chang Wong as his browbeating target whenever Chang ends up acting a bit too much like a teenager who doesn’t want the responsibilities dumped on him.

Dantesque17

Hey, man, you don’t know. We know next to nothing about the Condor 216’s design. Maybe it spins during takeoff.

Jenora Feuer

Except that, really, if you want some big influential thinker who leads people to behave in un-Christlike ways and mistreat each other, damning hundreds of thousands of souls because they followed him instead of Christ…

… really, you’d be doing the Anti-Christ as a televangelist. And there’s no way L&J would dare touch that, it might get people to think…

student

Has anyone else here taken a look at the updated version of the first book that was free on Amazon a while back? I ask because Carpathia isn’t a young Robert Redford anymore, he’s a young Brad Pitt. The silliness runs deep here.

Also, just as a remark, in case people weren’t aware, Chinese women don’t traditionally change their names upon marriage…

Has anyone else here taken a look at the updated version of the first
book that was free on Amazon a while back? I ask because Carpathia isn’t a young Robert Redford anymore, he’s a young Brad Pitt. The silliness
runs deep here.